WFIU Movie Reviews
with Peter Noble-Kuchera
2007

2006 Reviews | 2004-2005 Reviews
Beowulf (in 3D) - Listen

SWEENEY TODD

Director Tim Burton began his career with a half-dozen films of varying degrees of brilliance. What made them unique were Burton's off-kilter sense of humor, his cockeyed camera, and the bouncy musical scores of frequent collaborator Danny Elfman.

But after Mars Attacks bombed expensively in 1996 (the movie is flawed and inspired in equal measure), something changed. Burton responded with his first R-rated film, a film darker than any he'd done before, the angrily slapdash Sleepy Hollow. The humor was drowned in blood and livid, inky blackness. Rather than conjuring a world, the film seemed trapped in a claustrophobic set. At the time, I was heartbroken, sure that box office rejection had ruined a singular vision, as Baron Munchausen had lost us Terry Gilliam.

The thing is with Burton and Gilliam, they did change; they did go darker; and they demand that you adjust. I came around on Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm, and I've come around on Sleepy Hollow, which, as it turns out, was mere stage setting for Burton's finest hour: a film version of Stephen Sondheim's musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Sweeney has always been an odd duck in the musical theater, with its story of a vengeful barber who slits throats, and the crazy Mrs. Lovett who runs the bakery downstairs, turning the evidence into meat pies. Those who swear by the musical find it hilarious, with witty lyrics as sharp as the silver killing razors at the end of Sweeney's arms.

Picture a pretty young man with a honeyed voice. As Sweeney Todd observes, "Life has treated you kindly. You will learn." The boy chances to hear beautiful Joanna, Sweeney's long-lost, eyebrowless, big-boobed daughter, singing about birds trapped in cages. He spots her in a window, like Rapunzel in her upstairs prison, he on the street where Liza Doolittle lives. It borders on nauseating.

The thing is, we're being set up. Judge Turpin, the girl's stepfather, played by Alan Rickman with ice in his veins, invites the boy into the house. Offers to show him a collection of sex pictures from around the world. Orders his henchman, Beadle, played by Timothy Spall, who looks like a sinister version of the Mad Hatter, to beat the boy with a rod. And as the young man stumbles down a dark London alley, bruised and bloody, he picks up the song again, which has a sudden and fierce poignancy and fire.

That's the miraculous thing about this filmed version of Sweeney Todd: when it bares its teeth, which it does with disarming frequency, the music works better. The more gothic and Grand Guignol Burton takes it, the more arterial spray spatters the screen, the more falling bodies land right on their exploding heads - the more his vision coheres, and the possibilities of Sondheim's book drip like precious rubies. Here, film and musical theater actually bring out the best in each other; it's altogether inspired.

Burton has toned down his usual expressionism, instead borrowing the artificiality of the Hammer horror films. His sets look like sets; that is, they look fake. It's intentional; they are gloriously fake. It's a look set up in the opening credits, as we follow a trail of blood through an Edward Gorey-like, popup tableau of London to the sepulchral drone of a pipe organ. Or take the skunk shock of white in Sweeney's hair. It's at once a reference to The Bride of Frankenstein, a reminder of the horrors the character has seen, and a stroke of high glamour.

Finally, a word about two fine performances. An actress would have to be wary of tackling a role that Angela Lansbury had made iconic on Broadway. But Helena Bonham Carter, with no professional voice training, does Sondheim's clipped diction proud, singing about the worst pies in London like a nervous, chirping magpie, coaching Sweeney like a Lady MacBeth ("That's a throat to slit, my dear.") And Burton buttresses Bonham Carter with a surreal dream sequence, shot without shadows from her point of view, reminding us of Mrs. Lovett's syphilitic madness.

And then there is Johnny Depp. He is Burton's alter ego, and the two trust each other to go out on a limb to the very twigs. Depp clothes himself in eccentric layers, as he did for Jack Sparrow and Willy Wonka. Sweeney Todd would have collapsed if Depp couldn't sing. But he can, Burton has the touch for musicals, and we have the perfect antidote to the cloying consumerism of the season, an ichor-soaked stroke of Dickensian brilliance. Merry Christmas, God bless us, every one.

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BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD

I've been remiss, and in the process of reviewing obvious Oscar candidates and Winter blockbusters, I've delayed writing about one of the best films of the year until it is, doubtless, no longer playing at a theater near you.

The film is called Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. It was directed by Sidney Lumet, 83 years old, who has proven again that he is a grand master. Though this is not, definitely not, a film for everyone. Some people, justifiably, don't want to see a film that will upset them; and this is a film whose powerful emotions trouble the mind.

When finally cornered by bad luck and bad choices, some people collapse inwards like a wet paper box. Some straighten up their backbone and soldier through. And some bare their teeth like a rat in a trap. Andy, his trophy wife Gina (Marisa Tomei), and his brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) each represent one type. Which is which you'll have to see for yourself.

Andy is a moderately successful real estate broker ("I make six figures," he proudly announces - you can tell by his wife's guarded reaction that it's low six-figures, not much for Manhattan). Andy has been doing something bad, to pay for something bad. I'd love to tell you what, exactly, but I want you to see for yourself. What we do know at the beginning is that Andy is one polished operator. His younger brother Hank, who is hard up and way behind on his child support, is no match for Andy when Big Brother wants something.

Andy sucks Hank into a seemingly foolproof, scheme. Watch how smooth Andy is with Hank, how he has staged every element of the conversation to make the conclusion inevitable. They - by they, Andy means Hank - will waltz into a mom and pop jewelry store Andy has cased, on a weekend morning just after opening. There are no security cameras or guards. The whole week's take will be there, and Andy knows how to get into the safe. The loot is insured, so it's a victimless crime. How does he know all this, Hank wonders? Because the mom and pop who own the store are their actual Mom and Pop.

As we expect in a movie like this, the heist goes to pieces with a bang. From a visual standpoint, the scene is rather stagey, almost hokey. I worried about the rest of the film.

But Lumet knows he doesn't have to coat the screen with blood to achieve his effects. The film works because the heist, which in a more run-of-the-mill film would be one of the high points, is just the first turn of the screw. Lumet is interested in a different kind of violence: the powerful emotions, kept just barely under the surface, of a family in conflict; and the anxiety of being found out, as every decision seems to lead Andy and Hank further into a dark maze. Somehow, Lumet's camera itself seems like a heavy weight above us, pinning us down.

You will be unable to take your eyes off Philip Seymour Hoffman. Andy is a study in contradictions, thoroughly ambiguous. We keep seeing new layers all the way to the film's end. Credit the first time screenwriter, too, Kelly Masterson - there is not one beat of the plot, or line of dialog, out of place.

There is also a performance by the great Albert Finney, as the naughty boys' father. The actor himself looks very frail as his character grieves for a lost wife. But the search for the killer animates him; and as the truth starts to bubble up like swamp gas, the horror of the situation comes fully clear, and oh, do we not want to be there when he finds out.

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BEOWULF (IN 3D)

I saw Beowulf in a conventional theater last month. I have now seen it in Imax 3D with, as Imax trumpets, a screen six stories high and eighty feet wide, with 12,000 watts of digital surround sound. Now the vision of the director, Robert Zemeckis, is clear.

The movie is a technology-fest, depending, for its effect, on an absolutely cutting edge theater. Now, Grendel is truly scary; when the blue strobe light begins to flash, you feel that he is in the room with you. The blood of a sea monster cascades down upon you with a shocking vividness. And when you see a room filled with little digital people, you are not watching a flat screen; you are peering through glass at a diorama.

Let that sink in a minute. The screen is no longer flat. It is a window. That's up there with sound coming to the movies. That's up there with the arrival of color. It puts 3D movies on the spectrum of live performance.

The computer graphic human beings, so uncanny and off-putting in a conventional presentation, now work as they should; the close-ups, which computers have rendered in vastly increased resolution over the long shots, distract us from the artificiality of the faces as we are kept busy counting hairs on beards. There's a fascination with this game, as with any new toy; likewise with the spears and arrows that seem to poke out at you.

I'm reminded of Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, in which movie-goers attended something called the "feelies". They exited the theater talking about how realistic the helicopter explosion was, and how they could feel each individual hair on a bearskin rug. At the time, this passage made me shudder that moviegoers could be looking not for plot and character and story, but for sensation only. Surely this was science fiction. But that day has arrived - if that's all we demand of this technology.

I saw Imax 3D for the first time ten years ago, in California. It was a film about the ocean, in which a clutch of seals swam like alien beings through a sea of towering kelp. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, in or out of a theater. I literally wept for the joy of it.

Beowulf is a baby step, a tech demo by which real artists can calibrate their tools - if they ever get their hands on them. They will need to adhere to the grammar of the new medium: pans don't work. Rapid motion within the frame doesn't work. Rapid cutting interrupts the illusion of presence; we need stillness to search out the image. Closeups work, in a big way; our experience of the actors is so much more immediate. The 3D technique, with its greater immersion, would be absolutely brilliant for horror films; the diorama effect could bring new life to musicals, performance films, and any theatrical staging. What will true acting by human beings be like, when directed by an artist with a real screenplay in his back pocket? Can you imagine a 3D Macbeth?

Instead, I predict a long overdue splitting-off. There are now over 700 digital-3D-equipped theaters in America. That number is set to triple by 2009, when high profile movies by tech heads James Cameron and Peter Jackson are set to arrive. I guarantee you that George Lucas will re-release the Star Wars movies in 3D; if you look at the prequels, that's what he's had in mind for years. Computer graphics blockbusters, which have been taking over mainstream film, will go the 3D route. Good riddance.

"Conventional" cinema - and it pains me to have to call it that - will endure. For a time, the two styles will be side by side. The question is whether the movie theaters that project conventional movies can long survive against steadily improving home theater and declining ticket sales. Without the big "event" tentpoles, my guess is that they won't. And considering how bad the experience of going to a conventional theater has become, I'm increasingly resigned to watching the films I care about at home.

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NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Some books practically cry out from the shelves, "film me". Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men is one of those. It's a lean novel, all plot, with spare dialog coiling through it like a sidewinder in the desert. You can read it in just a few hours. For the most part, it stays out of the characters' inner lives and simply observes their behavior and records their hard-baked, pithy Texas talk.

The smartest thing a filmmaker can do with a gift like that is to film it straight. Luckily, it was Joel and Ethan Coen who got hold of this material. The Coen brothers are auteurs; twenty years ago, they would have jazzed everything up. But now, their sensibility is so evolved, they have nothing left to prove; and they are so in tune with McCarthy, its as if they wrote the novel, or he shot the film.

In certain scenes in the film, you may find yourself flashing back to the Coen's earlier masterpiece, Fargo. Once again we have a local sheriff - here named Ed Tom, played by Tommy Lee Jones - who is called to a crime scene of such wanton violence, it's almost surreal. There is a ring of SUVs in the desert, and a half-dozen bodies, including a dog, all riddled with at least three different kinds of bullets. There is a pair of bodies shot at a later time, execution style. This is clearly a drug deal gone wrong; but where are the drugs and the money?

The money - and it turns out there's two million dollars of it in a satchell - is in the hands of Llewellen Moss, played by Josh Brolin, churlish but with a sense of black humor. He came upon the SUV disaster while shooting game. Everybody was dead; surely the money doesn't know where it came from.

But in taking the money, and performing an act of kindness after the fact, Moss has brought upon himself and his loved ones the wrath of an evil so pure, so uncompromised, it may in fact be the arm of fate itself. It would like to think so; that's how it excuses its own existence. Whether it is correct is the theme of the film.

It is a man, if you can call him that; better to call him a being. His name is Anton Chigurgh. Like Schwarzenegger's terminator, he moves implacably forward, homing in on his target. Locked doors mean nothing to him; bodies fall where he walks the earth. He is even willing to stroll right into the arms of a police station.

So there is your narrative triangle: Moss on the run; Chigurgh close behind; and Ed Tom, so close to Chigurgh that he actually drinks from a milk jug Chigurgh has left behind on a coffee table, the bottle still sweating with condensation. This is a similar structure to Fargo, but here more reduced. Only a structure that pure could sustain the film's final twenty minutes, where it feels like anything could happen, anything at all.

Where the film goes, without telling you anything, is deeper into Ed Tom. Tommy Lee Jones creates a character who goes all the way down to this boots - a weary man facing the end of his career, and the possibility that it was all for nothing. What a run the actor has had. From his brilliant western The Three Burials of Melqiades Estrada (which he also directed, in 2005), to his wounded, cornered, dangerous character in In The Valley of Ellah, to Ed Tom in No Country For Old Men: what other actor's face is more care-worn, more able to evoke pathos, steely resolve, and sudden anger, more fascinating to watch?

As much as I admire the film - and I do, I really do - a part of me, perhaps uncharitably, was also longing for a freer, more surprising interpretation. As good as they are at manufacturing suspense, the Coens take no chances. Ironically, by being so faithful, they have produced a work a little too perfect. So what. See it anyway.

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BEOWULF

Who among us, if presented with a photograph of our significant other in another's embrace, would fully trust the evidence of our own eyes? Not these days, we wouldn't. Not when we see actresses on every magazine cover with heads digitally stitched onto someone else's airbrushed body. Not when a six year old can remove the red eye, sharpen, and brighten a snapshot with Photoshop on our home computer.

The photographic image - which was once light gathered by a lens and chemically exposed on a piece of silver-backed paper or celluloid - has become destabilized. We can never fully relax; we have to interrogate our film images in a way that's very new. The implications for the movies are profound.

In Beowulf - very loosely based on the poem - the actors have been supplanted by computer-generated facsimiles. Let's agree on the term "avatar". Take Anthony Hopkins, whose avatar is the King, haunted by embracing a demon many years ago and begetting a monster that now terrorizes the kingdom. To capture Hopkins's performance, the actor wore a rubber wet suit on his body and electrodes on his face, while a computer recorded every nuance.

In theory. In fact, motion capture in 2007 makes for very stiff body language. The facial expressions, too, are wooden, with a slackness through the cheeks and lips, as if another actor were wearing an Anthony Hopkins mask and lip syncing. Good animation isn't about acquisition; it's about an animator's imagination and skill invoking the truth of a thing.

Ray Winstone, whose avatar is Beowulf, the brave warrior from across the sea who has come to kill the monster Grendel, has a flabby body. But we see Beowulf in all his naked glory - minus a puerile game of hide the genitals - and there is not an ounce of fat on him. John Malkovich, who plays an oily advisor who has it in for Beowulf for reasons left murky, is, as an actor, fuller of tics than a grandfather clock. His avatar fares the best; when you dumb down the performance, since the original was exaggerated, something comes through.

So the avatars aren't quite there yet. Angelina Jolie, who plays the demon lover, whose face and body have been scanned and enhanced to a shiny naked perfection (save a few naughty bits), is a cartoon too cold to be much of a turn-on; she's too smooth. I have to wonder: why spend millions, when a real cartoonist like Ralph Bakshi can suggest sexiness with the stroke of a pen in Fritz the Cat or Cool World?

Ken Turan, film critic for the L.A. Times and NPR, in his crusty review, complained that the director, Robert Zemeckis, who also made Forrest Gump, has now been completely consumed by his own tools. Turan should take another look at the film he venerates (Gump), which begins and ends with a CG feather, and has hundreds of CG shots in between, including a digitally-amputated Gary Sinise. The fact is, the cutting edge of technology is where Zemeckis has always been most comfortable. It's the shakier half of his artistic stake.

In the end, Beowulf is a blind alley. Though its hammy dialog and pretty good story make for a film of acceptable momentum, it's not got the emotive quality that only real performers can bring. That is, so far. We can still tell the difference between an actor and an avatar, and I'm tempted to say that technological advances are like Xeno's Paradox, always halving the distance to the real thing, never arriving. But things are certainly getting uncanny, and I still haven't seen the film in 3D - the subject of a future review in mid-December. Maybe the real reason so many of us critics are skeptical of avatars is that we're trying to reassure ourselves, whistling past the graveyard of old paradigms.

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INTO THE WILD

John Krakauer's 1999 book Into the Wild was a publishing phenomenon. It told the true story of Christopher McCandless, who may be the first known case of death by reading. McCandless was privileged, good looking, and intelligent. He graduated from Emory University, and was probably on his way to Harvard Law. But he was also taciturn, misanthropic, and profoundly lacking in common sense. He became enraptured by the books of Jack London, Thoreau, and the whole host of romantics. Inspired by Tolstoy's renunciation of wealth and a return to nature, he gave away all his money, burned his identification, abandoned his car in the desert, renamed himself Alexander Supertramp, and fell off the face of the Earth. Two years later, his emaciated body was found in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness. Krakauer, through some outstanding reportage, reconstructed those two missing years in his book.

Enter Sean Penn, who is nearly as talented a director as he is an actor. He has filmed Into the Wild in a movie of the same name. Penn is an iconoclast, and something of a wanderer himself; you can see why McCandless' story resonated with him. Some critics have panned the film on the basis that it contains one too many ecstatic shots of nature. David Denby in the New Yorker writes, "[The film is] entirely too visual, to the point of being cheaply lyrical. Penn can't stop swirling around mountaintops, as if he were selling SUVs."

What a stupid charge, that a film, which like all films consists of photography plus sound, be "too visual"? The claim that the camera swirls incessantly in circles is also materially false; only one shot does that. Penn is certainly selling something, but that's not an SUV in the center of the screen - it's a person. Penn has captured America as McCandless saw it - its canyons, its rivers, its wild horses and eagles and blowing snow and endless fileds of yellow corn -- from the point of view of a man on foot, determinedly living in the present tense. That America is a place still mysterious and full of wild spaces.

Penn has also done something even more remarkable. He takes a step back from his subject. When McCandless, played with complete conviction by Emile Hirsch, meets fellow travelers along his path, they are struck by the beauty of the young man's commitment to his quest. It is easy to love folly in a child. But they are also alarmed. They see his naivete. They know the dangers of the world. Katherine Keener, who plays a hippie McCandless meets on the road, pointedly cautions him, "Do your parents know where you are? You look like a well-loved kid to me. Kids are often too hard on their parents."

Into the Wild reveals Penn's maturity in his unusual attention to the feelings of the parents. When we meet the couple, played by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden, we initially take the son's side, seeing the mother as an ineffectual alcoholic and the father as stern, unloving, and philandering. Yet whatever their faults, how cruel to disappear from your parent's life for years without so much as a phone call or a letter to let them know what you are up to, or even to know you are alive. The sister says, in voiceover narration, "My parents, at once in mortal conflict, had moved past anger and grief to a kind of stoic acceptance. Even their faces had changed." It was crucial to cast two actors who could reflect this; Hurt and Gay Harden do so expertly. At some point the worm turns, and we feel more sympathy for the parents than the son.

Into the Wild is, first and foremost, a gorgeous film, including its passionate score by Eddie Vedder and others. In its thrall to wilderness, it is only one step removed from the films of Terence Malik, which slow down enough to find, in beautiful surfaces, the mystery underneath. The film talks of God like it means it. It is long - two hours and twenty minutes - and that's key to its effect. You need to settle in. Penn's empathy for and understanding of all his characters makes the film something more. Many of us, when we are young, need to push back on our parents to establish our own identity. Christopher McCandless just pushed harder than most. Though his ending is fitting, you wish the Universe would have given a searching soul a free pass.

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THE DARJEELING LIMITED

Wes Anderson, the director of the delightful film The Royal Tennenbaums, is running out of time. He's beginning to frustrate us. Luckily, he seems to be just as frustrated with himself. With his new film, The Darjeeling Limited, he has made one too many films about privileged, dysfunctional families. He knows this, and keeps trying to break through to something new.

Before the film begins, you will see a short subject, by Anderson, called The Hotel Chevalier. A darkly handsome young man, played by Jason Schwartzman, is inert on a hotel bed in Paris. The camera prowls back and forth restlessly. We will learn that he has been in this purgatory for over a month; he can afford it indefinitely. He gets a call from a former lover who is in town for one night only. Can she come over? He has been running from her, but he cannot say no. He tidies the room, creating a little love nest as if by reflex rather than will.

When the girl arrives, she is played by Natalie Portman, looking like Mia Farrow circa Rosemary's Baby, in her dangerously trendy Vidal Sassoon coif. She flits about the room, sending signals so mixed, we in the audience are driven half mad, let alone the guy. Eventually, they prepare to make love; but there's too much pain in the bed, and the man is too emotionally exhausted for passion.

Strange way to start a movie. But the use of the short film creates an intimacy with the character, who we learn is named Jack. By spending a little time in Paris, the film, which always runs the risk of claustrophobia, has a chance to expand a little bit (later, there will be an equally short, equally effective sequence in New York City).

When the film proper begins, we see Jack again, still hiding out from life, this time on a long journey across India by train. He is here at the bequest of his oldest brother, Francis, Owen Wilson. Francis' head is bandaged following a motorcycle accident; but his eyes suggest his greatest wounds are internal. Also present, begrudgingly, is the angular and acerbic middle brother, Peter, Adrian Brody. One year after the death of their father, the three brothers have convened in India, following Francis's half-baked itinerary, which is supposed to lead them to spiritual enlightenment. Or something.

As we get to know the brothers - we're trapped on the train with them - we're meant to be laughing at the wacky games they play with loyalty, the way they fight with, triangulate, and manipulate each other. If I had never seen another Wes Anderson film, I might have been more patient with this passage; instead I found it repetitive and precious. "Would we have been friends, do you think, if we'd met in real life?" one of them asks. "Real life." What do they think they're in the middle of? They aren't even aware that a world outside the family even exists.

On film, spiritual quests played as farce are common, and they are almost always shapeless. The Darjeeling Limited is no exception. Though the screenplay is actually structurally complex, it feels like a string of arbitrary and forced variations. But then we reach the exact center of the film; and now, at last, real life comes crashing down on the brothers.

I won't spoil anything by revealing the form tragedy takes, but it does strike. Suddenly, India is not a series of postcards witnessed through the windows of a moving train; it is real. Anderson briefly shoots this departure with a hand-held camera -- hard to believe, considering the arch perfection of his usual style.

But as much as I was yearning for the style to explode, and the story to whiz off on a new trajectory, this turns out only to be an interlude. Anderson's style reasserts itself with his favorite punctuation: quick, precise 90 degree pans, chopping the space into Ozu-like squares. This was an inspired technique for an exquisite miniature like Tennenbaums; but faced with the mountain of India, that style is like chipping at a mountain with a little rock hammer.

As these handsome, modish young men in tailored suits goofed around India, looking in vain for something already in their possession, I thought often of Richard Lester's Beatles films. Those are fine movies, but the Beatles, inspired by trips to India, took their work to much more interesting places. At the end of The Darjeeling Limited, in a painfully overblown metaphor, in slow motion, the brothers leave their expensive custom luggage behind in order to catch a departing train. I wondered: when they return to their lives, have they learned to live without the luggage, or will they replace it, just the newest Westerners who can't integrate India into their lives? And will The Darjeeling Limited turn out to be a transitional film for Anderson, a stepping stone to wider vistas of compassion? Time will tell.

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON

The metaphor that stuck with me after seeing the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon was the "daisy chain". Michael Collins, one of the Apollo astronauts, uses this term in describing his incredibly unlikely trip to the moon. He means that, to get into orbit, the astronauts had to sit on top of what amounted to a bomb; Atlas boosters were blowing up every day at Cape Canaveral. And the force of that bomb must be so controlled that an object something like a pencil must remain perfectly upright. Then, using computers far less powerful than the one I'm typing on right now, they had to plot a perfect vector to orbit the moon. In one sequence that's among the film's most thrilling, the Eagle, the gossamer lunar landing module, affords its pilot with only three minutes of fuel to find the perfect landing spot among all the craters, mountains, and rocks. Miss the landing, or use too much fuel, and the astronauts would have called the moon their home forever.

So there it is: the daisy chain. These guys thought the moon shot would work, but nobody really knew. If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, in this case there could be no weak link, not among the astronauts or among the NASA engineers or their newly-designed equipment, nor in the thousands of decisions and operations that put men on the moon and brought them back safely. Any broken link in that long, long chain could have meant disaster.

In the Shadow of the Moon contains a good amount of privileged footage, some of it spectacular; I could have remained on the moon the entire film, watching the astronauts racing the rover around as the Earth rose above them. The film also contains a fair amount of talking heads, shot with the same stuffy camera setup. But then again: what talking heads they are! Only 24 people have gone that unimaginable distance to the moon, and every one of them still alive is interviewed here, save the reclusive Neil Armstrong. Their memory of those days is crystal clear, to a man. This was the event that defined the rest of their days; they aren't likely to forget it.

So they tell us details that no book or film like The Right Stuff or film like Apollo 13 could ever get right, though feedback from those films has worked its way into the astronauts' speech. Light flickers in their eyes as these former test pilots admit just how exciting it was to go that fast and that high. Some of them express guilt at having missed the Vietnam war. Every one of them displays a deep and genuine modesty, repeating they just felt lucky to be there. Getting men like these on record was a public service.

In the Shadow of the Moon is, in the very best sense, a patriotic film. When you see that enormous rocket lifting off, filling the screen with the letters "USA", you feel a sharp stab of pride. But by the film's end, the astronauts are at great pains to say that this was not one country's achievement, but an achievement for all human beings. Many of them are acutely concerned about global warming, and the fact that our big cities are now choked in a miasma of toxic gasses that are clearly visible from space pains them. In 2007, there's a whole lot more blue on the globe, and a whole lot less white. And when the Astronauts speak of the three billion people who watched the moon landing on television, consider that the world population has doubled since then. Let that sink in a minute.

In the Shadow of the Moon is a great film for all but the youngest of kids. Tell them they have to pick up the ball back where we dropped it, making space a priority again. Let's get a base built on the moon. Let's go to Mars. As the writer Arthur C. Clarke was so fond of saying, "The Earth is too small a basket to hold all of humanity's eggs." And tell them that stewardship of the Earth comes first; that the fragile jewel of our planet hanging in darkness is the most important image we human beings now have, and it should guide everything we do.

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MICHAEL CLAYTON

Even the name has a solidity and self-confidence to it: Michael Clayton. It's the name of a new film starring George Clooney in the titular role. The actor, and writer/first-time-director Tony Gilroy, know they are working with a great script - oiled, sharp, serrated. Gilroy was so sure he had a winner - and that nobody could play Michael Clayton but George Clooney - that he was willing practically to stalk the actor to get him on board. That utter confidence in the material has spread to the actor, who does some of his most understated and nuanced work. He and Gilroy have made a legal thriller head and shoulders above Hollywood adaptations of the John Grisham books, say.

The film opens with a rapid-talking, half-incoherent voice, ranting about the evils of big law firms and big corporations. It is the voice of Arthur Edens, played by Tom Wilkinson. Edens, we learn, was the architect of the entire defense of a giant agri-conglomerate, which is being sued in a three billion dollar class action suit. A brilliant litigator, Edens is also bipolar. Apparently, he has cracked from the strain, ripping off his clothes in a deposition and running naked down the street. He is currently cooling his heels in a Milwaukee jail.

Michael Clayton has been with the same law firm, along with Edens, for a dozen years, but has never risen in the ranks. We learn that this is by design; he has been groomed to operate below the radar. When one of the firm's star clients gets into a situation he can't handle, Clayton is sent in, empowered with all the firm's connections, quietly to clean up the mess. When he goes to clean up Arthur Edens, a friend and mentor, Edens tells him, "We're not lawyers. We're janitors." It's clear from the fatigue in Clayton's shoulders and eyes that he agrees. Though he is divorced, no longer young, and practically broke from gambling, his profession has utterly sapped the energy needed to change his life.

If there's one thing a person has while in a manic state, its energy. It takes a brave actor to go toe to toe with Tom Wilkinson, who is like a grizzly bear when he turns on you. Clooney is up to it. Clayton and Edens have a series of fascinating verbal duels. Edens, off his meds, is clearly insane at the moment; Clayton is getting through enough that Edens recognizes this. "You'd better listen to me, because I don't see anybody else with a broom on the horizon. I'm IT, Arthur." But Edens demands: is Clayton so sure that it's JUST the madness? "I've spent 12% of my life defending the reputation of a deadly weed killer," he declaims with the fury of Moses on Mount Sinai. "Everything is radiant; I'm not losing this." The film is perceptive here. It is a feature of some manic episodes that the sufferer knows he is manic, but refuses to give up the high, which, frankly, does give one the edge (never mind the crash at the end). And sometimes, madness and genius are indistinguishable. In this case, the spiritually-exhausted Michael Clayton is sparked by Edens's flame, and will soon be consumed by a conflagration of purpose and meaning.

As good a film as Michael Clayton is - and it's very good indeed, an outstanding entertainment - Tony Gilroy is not yet at the level of the directors he is emulating, among them Sidney Pollack, who has a role in the film, lending the power, cynicism, and veiled menace that are his specialty. Other '70s icons Gilroy probably admires are Alan J. Pakula, and especially Sidney Lumet. Gilroy has not made The Verdict -- at least not yet. There's nothing wrong with where he puts the camera, but he doesn't work the space between angry men to bring out the tension.

That said, as you watch his shrewd, assured entertainment, you may have to pinch yourself to remember that this is Gilroy's first time as a director. It's yet another argument that the writer should more often be in charge. As Harlan Ellison once said, "Directors are just men who cannot live within their allotment of adoration. Writers do the whole damn dream." Amen to that.

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THE KINGDOM

The makers of The Kingdom - director Peter Berg and producer Michael Mann -- would like you to believe that their film is topical. It is, in the medical sense; that is, applied to a body part without penetrating, in this case the brain. In a different time, that the film moves efficiently may have been enough to partially excuse its inanity. But considering its theater is the middle-east, and its subject is the hunt for an American-killing terrorist, this is hardly the time for cock and bull.

It's a passionately appealing fantasy to airdrop an American superwarrior to re-wage a lost war, and this time, by God, win it. Though Jamie Foxx looks a more suitable gladiator for 2007 than Sylvester Stallone, make no mistake: this is Rambo all over again.

My problems film are two fold. First, I resent the bait and switch. If you watched the evolution of trailers for The Kingdom, you saw the evidence of significant re-tooling, or at least re-packaging. Originally, the film was pitched as a straight-up action movie. But a few months before release, new trailers emphasized a supposed political relevance; now the film looked a lot like Syrianna. This has to do with the film's delay from a summer to a fall release, when studios believe audiences are primed to think, or at least think about the Oscars, and heavier movies stand a better chance at the box office. That's the theory. The theory is nonsense. A good movie is a good movie regardless of when it comes out. So is a bad one.

The Kingdom begins with a précis of Saudi history, beginning with the establishment of the state in 1932, through the discovery of oil and the setting up of Saudi elites, through the energy crisis and the '74 embargo and Iraq's incursion into Kuwait, and finally to the Saudi alienation of Bin Laden. It's an auspicious opening. We are swept up in a whirlwind of characters, each with his name and title inscribed below his face, as in the documentary No End In Sight.

And then the film changes gears. The history lesson? Forgotten. The big cast of political power players? Dropped. This is a movie in which four Federal agents, with the help of a Saudi policeman but essentially acting on their own, catch one of the worst terrorists in the world within seventy-two hours. Could we have caught Bin Laden if we had moved as quickly in Afghanistan? As I said, the film is about re-waging our old battles.

My second objection to the film is to its entire third act, in which fantasy completely overtakes us and the violent payback we desire arrives in force. I don't think we do desire that payback; I think they think we're stupid. A convoy of black SUVs carrying the Americans is struck by a Mercedes carrying a car bomb; and under a hail of gunfire, one of the Federal agents is taken hostage. The scene is well staged; but we've been here before, not least in the machine-guns-in-the-street battle from Michael Mann's Heat (not for nothing was Michael Mann the producer of The Kingdom).

While the captured Fed is being prepped for a beheading (and no points for guessing if Daniel Pearl dies a second time), the remaining Americans are trapped in an alley, pinned down by machine gun fire from the rooftops. They are fish in a barrel, but the American bullets find their mark with the accuracy of a settler's bullet in the heart of an Indian in a Western. Even Jennifer Garner, who plays the token woman who is along mostly to cast aspersion on the poor treatment of women under Islam, gets to kick the butt of a Saudi man twice her size.

I wonder: if it were released today, would James Cameron's film True Lies -- in which Arnold Schwarzenegger pilots a Harrier jump jet against Arab terrorists with the bomb in downtown Miami - still be a blockbuster? Sadly, I suspect that it would. Complexity can wear you down, and when you're down, well-produced stupidity has a chance to get by you. Don't let them do it to you. We're better than this.

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EASTERN PROMISES

Eastern Promises traffics in the clichés of movies about the mob; but because its fatalism is so specific, and so specifically Russian, the material is revivified. The film has something of the tragic heft of Coppola's Godfather films; but because it was directed by David Cronenberg, it's fundamentally modernist. Cronenberg, one of the most original of directors, with many a virtuoso performance behind him, turned the corner to absolute mastery with his last film, A History of Violence. These two recent films, both starring Viggo Mortensen at the apex of his powers, seem effortless, perhaps able to attain more by staying well within genre boundaries. Eastern Promises is more elusive than A History of Violence, but the juice is there, just below surfaces that gleam like a black boot polished to a mirror shine.

The film begins with an act of violence, and later contains a violent scene too much discussed in the media. The less said about all of this the better - violence is used sparingly in the film, but to great and grisly effect because the blocking is unusually well thought out, the makeup is excellent, and the details are almost clinical. Brace yourself.

The blood of the crime-world connects it to the scene that follows. Anna Khitrova, a pretty, blonde nurse-midwife, attends the surviving baby of a fourteen-year-old mother who has died of placental abruption. Anna is greatly moved. Later, at the home of her mother and uncle (both Russian), where Anna has been staying lately, we learn why she was so affected by the dead girl and her baby. The uncle (Jerzy Skolimowski), a glass of Slivovitz in hand, tells her, "I'm glad your boyfriend left you. It's not right to mix races with a black man. That's why the baby died inside you." Anna is outraged; she'd like to shed the Russian heritage that claws at her with decrepit hands.

Still, Anna asks her uncle to translate the dead girl's diary, which she has purloined. It's slow going, but it becomes clear that the girl was involved with the Russian mob; and stuck inside is a business card for a Russian restaurant called the Trans-Siberian.

Anna negotiates the looming London traffic on her miniature motorcycle. Upon arrival at the restaurant, she is given the meaty eye by a driver, Nikolai (Mortensen), standing in waiting by his car. There is something comical about his tacky, slick hair, but he is threatening, too -- as if he is standing guard, as if the muscles under his loose-fitting, elegant suit could leap into animalistic action. Though his eyes are hidden behind black shades, she shrinks from the aggressiveness of his stare.

Anna meets the restaurant's proprietor, Semyon, played by Armin Mueller-Stahl. He is paternalistic, frustratingly condescending, denying any knowledge of the dead girl. The meeting is over, his back is to her, he's cooking in the kitchen. And then Anna, suddenly emboldened by a righteous anger, mentions the diary. Semyon turns around slowly, wipes his hands. "A diary?" A new, menacing light flickers in his eyes.

As Anna leaves, we see her from Nikolai's point of view - her pert bottom in tight jeans, her body constricted by leather boots and a motorcycle jacket. And with that, we have shifted perspectives. As Anna rides off, we remain in another, older world - the world of a driver who tries to stay out of trouble, but who may have secret motives; a world at once familiar and strange, thrillingly dangerous, and erotic.

I fear that it will be easy to see Eastern Promises and feel let down. A straight read will find it to be almost maddeningly modest. But I invite you to sense what the expressive eye of the camera is really showing you: the buried themes, the complex motives, the sexuality. This is a film as black, rich, and rare as caviar.

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THE BRAVE ONE

Erica Bain, played by Jodie Foster in the film The Brave One, is trim and lithe, with a short, messy-chic haircut. She is the host of a weekly radio segment, which must pay a whole lot better than in my experience of public radio. She walks around New York City with a microphone, recording bits of street life, telling corny stories of the living city in a faux-husky voice. As she perambulates, we witness everything we love about New York: the smarts, the eccentricities, the ethnic rainbow. She has a strong, pretty Indian doctor, played by Naveen Andrews, whom she will soon marry.

But there is something manic about Erica. She is dangerously enamored of the city, unaware that in a single second the place can swat her like a fly. On a walk in the park at night with her fiancé and their big German shepherd, Erica's tiny face at exactly the level of her man's broad chest, when it seems nothing can touch them, the city pounces.

The couple passes by letters in stone that say "Stranger's Gate," ignoring the warning. The dog runs off. They kiss, and the camera breaks the so-called 180 degree rule, jumping from one side of them to the other (no director does this by accident; reflections are a major theme in the film). Then they enter a dark tunnel to retrieve the dog - Alice through the looking glass, now down the rabbit hole. (That we think of fairy tale motifs is no accident; the director is Neil Jordan, who specializes in them.) They are surrounded suddenly by a pack of wolves - three gang bangers. As mournful Bernard Herman-style strings swell, as the camera lists sideways, Erica takes a savage beating. Her fiancé does not survive.

What follows is an image of startling beauty. As Erica sleeps, in a three-week-long coma, her index finger, glowing red from the pulse monitor attached to it, climbs like an alien creature up her body, gently stroking her face, waking her at last. Who is operating that hand? Later, Erica says, "It is astonishing - numbing - to find inside of you, there is a stranger". There is your answer.

Agoraphobic and unable to leave her apartment, Erica holds her own bruised, wrung-out body, memories of lovemaking tumbling with images of the beating, a redux of a famous scene in Don't Look Now. What emerges from this chrysalis is a different woman, green with rage, her eyes a predatory slit. When she grips an illegal 9mm automatic, not only is her hand steady, but it wraps hungrily around the gun's stock in instant recognition.

Many prominent critics, Roger Ebert a three-and-a-half star exception, have called The Brave One a cynical button pusher. "Don't be fooled," admonishes A.O. Scott in the New York Times. "Though well cast and smoothly directed, [the film] is just as crude and ugly as you want it to be." In fact, the film is neither topical nor political enough to spark in us those earnest conversations about morality, society, and violence against women. It is neither Death Wish nor Dirty Harry. The fantasy motifs should tell us we're in a different kind of reality. I'm not saying that if a film is clearly make believe we should excuse its politics; rather that some films are so lyrical, we should give them poetic license.

A word about the mesmerizing Terence Howard. Here he plays the detective on the hunt for the vigilante. Of course he does not suspect little Erica. But the actor is able to convey that his subconscious is conducting its own investigation, circling ever closer to Erica, quietly putting her in situations where she might reveal herself - this despite his lonely attraction to her. And Erica is practically begging this gentle man, so like her dead fiancé, to stop her.

Okay, this situation is not remotely plausible. But the two actors share a couple of scenes that are so dizzying, you have to admit they almost sell it. If you take The Brave One the way it's intended, you'll find a film tightly written, visually textured, confidently directed, and acted with emotional precision. Genre doesn't come much better than this.

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NO END IN SIGHT

An unusually sober documentary, No End In Sight, has finally arrived after months of critics trying to draw our attention to it. It dissects the conduct of the Iraq war without any ironic narration in the style of Michael Moore. This is not a film about how we were misled into war; that's Fahrenheit 9/11. Nor is it about how a fearful news media helped sell us on false intelligence; that's Bill Moyer's Buying the War. There is only a little history, such as how the 2003 embargo laid a base of suffering in Iraq in which extremism flourished.

Instead, No End in Sight provides one interview after another with very high-level officials who were directly involved in the war's execution, who are now so angry they can no longer remain silent. We're not talking about pundits here; we're talking about the senior military and Iraq analysts who were right in the center of the decision making. Since the film's limited release over a month ago, no serious challenge has been raised to its facts.

The film was created by the former head of the Brookings Institute, Charles Ferguson. What he delineates, in a fashion unimpeachably authoritative, is a series of one stupid decision after another by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others, arrived at through naiveté and a bullheaded failure to listen. Was it inevitable, after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, that old and new hatreds should shatter Iraq into utter chaos? Possibly not. But toppling a government with insufficient troop levels, no understanding of the complexities of the country, and no plan for a replacement structure was a recipe for disaster. Generals on the ground warned the Bush/Rumsfeld team about this loud and clear in 2003. But the Bush inner circle, none of whom spoke Arabic or had any military or foreign policy experience, marginalizing sane voices in the State Department, was convinced American troops would be welcomed as liberators, and the rest would be easy.

The film demonstrates that many average Iraqis did not reject American troops - at least at first. But in the first of a long series of wrong choices, American troops were ordered to do nothing to stop the looting that soon broke out. The film shows footage of absolute lawlessness sweeping the country; the 7,000-year-old treasures of the Iraqi National Museum destroyed; the Iraqi National Library burned to the ground. This is cut against footage of Donald Rumsfeld jokingly dismissing the looting. The disconnect is astonishing. This, the film argues, was the real beginning of the insurgency.

But the most terrible mistake, the film argues, was still to come. Paul Bremmer, an inner circle bureaucrat, without warning or consultation, disbanded the Iraqi army. That meant half a million armed men kicked onto the street with no way to feed their families. It meant 50% unemployment, instantly. Now, instead of using the Iraqi army to combat a growing insurgency, the disenfranchised army became the insurgency.

In the absence of a stable Iraqi government, army, or police force, with the Americans largely confined to the Green Zone and ordered not to establish martial law, a power vacuum was created. It now seems inevitable that Islamic fundamentalism moved into the void, ushering in Muqtada al-Sadr and a proliferation of deadly militias.

No End in Sight is one of the saddest films I have seen. Over four years, the waste of 150,000 Iraqi lives, over 3,000 U.S. dead and 20,000 more wounded, the expense of almost $2 trillion, has brought us to total failure of our objectives. We live in strange times; our news media should be the ones telling this story. But increasingly, we must turn to our documentarians. Should you see the film? Only if you want to be informed.

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SUPERBAD

Let us all say a prayer of thanks for Judd Apatow, writer/director of The 40-Year-Old-Virgin and Knocked Up. The newest movie to emerge from his producing nimbus, called Superbad, is the funniest film since Borat! Just as Borat! pushed its rigged situations to the breaking point, a lot of what makes Superbad laugh-out-loud funny is that it tests the very limits of the R rating. The male and female genital-obsessed dialog is so profane, it passes Tarantino on the left doing 125 mph. I'm sure the MPAA would have demanded changes, had they not been on the floor holding their ribs.

Part of the Apatow formula - partly his temperament, partly taking inspiration from the Farrelly Brothers -- is that you can get away with near infinite raunch if you balance it with sweetness. That leavening is provided here by the deep affection best friends Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera) have for each other, even as they are growing apart, one preparing for college, the other preparing for not much. Seth is a curly-haired, fat little ball of energy, whose eyes pop in apoplexy - part John Belushi, part Tom hanks. Evan doesn't stutter, quite, but the words never seem to come fast enough; and when they do, they often make awkward situations even more painful. These boys click together like Legos.

Seth and Evan are virgins with years of stoppered hormones and no idea how to talk to girls. Where the movie is perceptive is that, though the boys don't see it, the girls are just as awkward. A pair of hotties, seemingly way out of Seth and Evan's league, miraculously give them the time of day. We squirm as the guys brag about the fake ID they're getting, and their supposed carousal in clubs (Becca, played by a very funny Martha MacIsaac, asks why she never sees Evan at parties. He's too busy doing cooler things, he says).

Jules, Emma Stone, Seth's intended, kinda likes him before she ever takes advantage of him; she's a good egg. Then she turns those startling baby blues on him, from behind her copper hair, asking Seth to use the vaunted fake ID to buy alcohol for her party. So he and Evan are off on an odyssey to make it to the party with the booze.

Because the script, by childhood friends Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (Seth and Evan, get it?), aims for the outrageous, some of the boys' adventures ring false, especially a subplot with a couple of cops that's terribly, terribly unlikely (though charming). Drawing down on a drunk at a crowded bar? The lack of plausibility keeps the film from achieving the heights of the classic Dazed and Confused.

Seth, however, is real and memorable, though he can get on your nerves. He's like a horniness pressure cooker. His best friend is about to go off to a good college without him; it is desperately important to him that he get a girlfriend for the summer. The film's most moving scene is when - without revealing too much, I hope - he arrives at the party with the alcohol. For one slow-motion moment, he's the quintessence of cool; on one of Tarantino's famous walks, with Matthew McConaughey, king of the pool hall, on his left, Travolta in a white suit on his right; Tom Sawyer at his own funeral. Such moments in life are few enough and fleeting, and the smart film knows to stretch them out.

Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera

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RESCUE DAWN

In 1998, Werner Herzog made a superb documentary called Little Dieter Needs to Fly. The film follows an aging Dieter Dengler, a German expatriate who, in 1965, at the beginning of his career in the U.S. Navy, flew a disastrous mission over Laos. His tiny plane was shot down over the Ho Chi Minh trail. He was captured by the Viet Cong, tortured, and detained in a prison camp so forgotten and forlorn, even the guards were starving. And because of his own steel will and resourcefulness, he escaped, traversing countless miles of dense jungle to eventual rescue. When they picked him up, this tall man weighed eighty-five pounds.

That's the story. As Dieter tells it in the film, you're not likely to forget it; not because of the horrors he recounts, which he tells as flat facts. It's that you recognize in Dieter a man who cheated Death, and knows it. How does he cope with the memories? The fact that he can only sleep knowing that thousands of pounds of food nestle under the floorboards of his house gives some clue.

Herzog's own fascination with Dieter didn't end with the documentary, or when Death finally came for Dieter in 2001. The director has returned to the story, punctuating it with dramatic fades to black, peopling it with fine actors, and rounding it out with a lush soundtrack, in a film called Rescue Dawn.

That the film happened at all is a credit to actor Christian Bale, who waited years, committed to playing Dieter. When Bale became Batman, Herzog says, raising $10 million became easy. Bale throws himself into the role, dropping serious weight (though less than for The Machinist), allowing himself to be covered in leaches, drowned by monsoons or by torturers, bearing the sharp thorns of the jungle in bare feet. But, perhaps as coached by the cool intelligence of Herzog, perhaps choosing to keep some of enigmatic Dieter's emotions private, his performance is more impressive than touching. That Dieter makes a better Dieter Dengler is an unfair criticism.

Bale has zeroed in on the source of Dieter's crazy enthusiasm: he's a man in a hurry. As a boy, when his village was bombed senselessly, Dieter became fascinated by the awesome power of the planes. From that moment, nothing would stand in the way of his dream: not to go to war. Just to fly. Bale's Dieter has an almost childlike optimism that hurtles him forward, cutting a path through the world. He answers snarling faces with a smile, humiliations and excruciations with an indignant "What the hell is this, the middle ages?" He's ahead of the blows because he's ahead of himself.

I won't spoil the details of the thrilling escape from the camp, and I'll only briefly discuss the film's third act, which is as riveting as similar passages in The Deer Hunter or The Hunted, or Herzog's own Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Dieter and Duayne (played by Steve Zahn with eyes like burning coals) support each other through an immense landscape so hostile, it's like an alien planet. It has become cliché to say that Herzog's main theme is man versus nature. But nature is only one of the forces Herzog uses, and that reckoning ignores the purpose. What you see happen to Dieter and Duyane, and to a lesser degree to the actors who portray them, is a clarification. All that is not necessary burns off. Or, as Dieter says, "In order to survive, empty what is full. Fill what is empty."

Now that Ingmar Bergman is gone, there is no greater living director than Werner Herzog. Is this one of his best films? No - but with the documentary as the other half of a larger work, yes. That Rescue Dawn is actually playing in my home town of Bloomington is a rare opportunity.

Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera.

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PAPRIKA

If I were to give a title to this review of the film Paprika, I would call it "Of Anime and Anima". That is: anime, a Western term that roughly refers to all Japanese animation; and anima, a Jungian term describing the idealized woman that all men supposedly carry within.

Paprika is an animated film from Japanese director Satoshi Kon. It's also the name of the title character. She has impossibly wide eyes, a long torso, the perfect breasts for her frame - a Siren's blend of Peter Pan and Lolita. She is a gamine dancing through the dreams of others, quicksilver as a minnow, chameleonic as Daphne, unfathomable and always just out of reach. Satoshi Kon has searched himself, found his anima, and set her free.

In perfect contrast to Paprika is Dr. Atsuko Chiba, a psychiatrist of porcelain skin and chilly disposition. Chiba has been working with two scientists - a dwarflike old man, the project chief, and a mountainous savant, her former boyfriend -- to create a device called the D.C. Mini. The Mini allows those who use it to "hack in" to the dreams of others.

Secretly, Dr. Chiba has been freelancing with the device. Her dream avatar is Paprika, less an alter ego than a deep part of herself not fully under her control. The film begins as intrepid Paprika navigates the nightmares of a troubled police officer, Detective Kogawa. Inside his mind, from the garish imagery of a three-ringed circus to flickering scenes from movies of various genres, Paprika sticks with Kogawa, mutating into every ingénue who ever lived on celluloid. Of course the cop with the tense shoulders falls instantly for her insouciance.

Three of the D.C. minis have gone missing, and have fallen into the hands of a mysterious "dream terrorist". It's a science fiction premise familiar from films such as Brainscan and Dreamscape, but that's not really a weakness. Paprika is a film very much aware of, and very much about, other films, which are seen as self-contained dream-worlds. This includes Fellini's 8 ½ , which is referenced specifically, and previous works by this director (I think I first glimpsed Paprika in Kon's thriller Perfect Blue). Anyhow, it's best to leave the too-dense plot behind and dive directly into the cascade of images.

Adjusting to that imagery can be difficult for those used to American animated features, which favor technical slickness over expressiveness. Japanese animated films are jerkier, with fewer individual frames per second. There is a human quality to lines drawn by hand that is completely missing from the sterile computer animation that has conquered American films.

Let's get down to brass tacks: Walt Disney knows nothing of sex. Dumbo the elephant was undoubtedly born of immaculate conception. Paprika, and most of Japanese animation in general, is for grown-ups. Though there is only one scene in the film that could be described as overtly sexual - and it's a doozy -- the film is highly erotic, with a certain sinuousness of line, as if all flesh were mutable. In fact, I think the entire film might be read as the struggle of a woman to come to terms with the body of her obese lover.

And struggle is what it's all about: the struggle to integrate warring parts of the psyche into a single identity, the struggle to resist assimilation by a faceless mass. Where does that absorbing, tentacled mass come from, that appears at the climax of so many Japanese animated films? What cultural anxieties does it suggest? I won't speculate, except to say that it brings with it a total loss of narrative control. But of Paprika, a creation of nearly pure cinema, the last thing we should desire is discipline. This film unscrews the top of your head and tinkers with the wiring inside. It's the movie to beat this year.

Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera

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THE SIMPSONS MOVIE

There was a time when it seemed like every kid in America was wearing a Bart Simpson tee shirt. After twenty years and over 400 episodes, the TV show The Simpsons has finally seen a steep decline in viewership, if not quality. The theatrical release of The Simpsons Movie is, therefore, a marketing shot in the arm, which, last week, paid off in a $71 million opening weekend. But as Homer himself says at the beginning of the film, "Why should we pay good money to see something we can get on TV for free?" Actually, there's plenty of reason.

The movie is a gift to fans and the talented voice actors who have stuck with the same basically static characters for so many years. Each of the Simpsons is at last granted an epiphany. Bart, who worships his father, finally realizes that slovenly Homer is possibly the worst dad on the planet. He begins to gravitate to neighbor Ned Flanders, he of the lisp and the sweater vests and the Evangelical Christian bent. Flanders, who is a good man in addition to being a hopeless square, feels for the sad little boy, and leaves a cup of cocoa on the window sill for him.

Here's what happens to the cocoa. Flanders adds whipped cream. Then shaves on some nutmeg. Then adds a marshmallow. Then he takes out a butane grill starter and toasts the marshmallow. You can almost hear that roomful of writers - the most talented stable since the days of the old Hollywood writing pool -- egging each other on. In this, the film resembles a borscht belt comedy like the Zucker brothers movies or Mel Brooks films, piling gag on gag like that cup of cocoa.

But I think the key to the success of The Simpsons is that it's a true cartoon. We need to make a distinction between animated films, like those of Pixar and Disney, and cartoons, which grew out of a tradition in newspapers, and are often hotly political. "I'm afraid you've gone mad with power, sir," says an underling to the megolomaniacal head of the EPA, Russ Cargill (Albert Brooks). "Of course I have," he says. "Ever gone mad without power? No one listens to you."

There's many a thumb-in-the-eye to the U.S. government and the religious right in The Simpsons Movie. If your values are conservative, and you have trouble laughing at yourself, you should see something else, because this is a film with an agenda. But for the rest of us, series creator and cartoonist Matt Groening, producer James L. Brooks, and their writing team provide gags here that have the zing only a cartoon can bring. I can't resist giving one example.

Russ Cargill has ordered a giant glass dome to be lowered over the town of Springfield. Now, picture this: a church sits side by side with a bar. Fearing the end of the world, the occupants of both buildings empty onto the street. They look up, see the dome, scream - and then switch buildings.

Cartoons are, at heart, a sort of revenge of the nerds. In the film, a kid, his arm being twisted by a bully, says, "Okay, I'll say it! Global warming is a myth! It needs more study!" The bully hits him anyway: "That's for not sticking to your principles." Finally, the kid can't take it any more, and in a fit of rage, cleans the bully's clock. "Wow, this feels great!" he says. "I see why you do it!" Matt Gorening has come a very long way from drawing bitterly disaffected doodles in the margins during algebra class. Iit's worth eight bucks to share the last laugh.

Reviewing movies for WFIU, this is Peter Noble-Kuchera.

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RATATOUILLE

Pixar studios has no one to blame but itself. Its films Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles have raised the bar so high, for what's possible in a computer animated film, that it's well-nigh impossible for a new movie to clear it. Ratatouille, Pixar's latest, would probably seem remarkable were it made by anyone else. But when Pixar plays it safe, it's a letdown.

Ratatouille is the story of Remy, a rat gourmand who dreams of becoming a great chef; and Linguine, his human friend, a clumsy kitchen garbage boy who dreams of at least holding down a job for a change. That premise would seem a good fit for screenwriter/director Brad Bird's favorite theme, worked out in movies like The Incredibles and The Iron Giant: that genius must be protected from the tyranny of mediocrity.

But Ratatouille doesn't have the spark of Bird's passion projects, where one scene touches off the next like string of firecrackers. The concept for the film - an idea so good, it might have been made into a Newberry Award-winning children's book - isn't Bird's. It belongs to Jan Pinkava, the animator of a previous Pixar short called Geri's Game.

Pixar has, in the past, been wonderful about letting up-and-coming directors have their shot at the big time. Andrew Stanton, for example, got the green light to direct his first feature, Finding Nemo, based on the imagination and completeness of his storyboards. Bird has said that Pinkava couldn't get the story into shape. It's more likely that this time, Pixar declined to take a risk. So the script, credited to Bird but likely crafted by committee, is a cookie-cutter widget from Screenplay 101.

There's another foundational problem. An animated film lives or dies by the quality of its voice actors. It's impossible to imagine Toy Story without Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, Nemo without Albert Brooks, or The Incredibles without Craig T. Nelson and Holly Hunter. But the lead voices in Ratatouille are painfully off-key. Remy is voiced by comedian Patton Oswalt, Linguine by Lou Romano. Both make the mistake of trying to sound funny. It works better when the actor plays it straight, and the animation does the exaggerating. Witness how much more believable are Peter O'Toole and Jeanine Garofalo, as the cadaverous and feared food critic Anton Ego and black-haired, cute-as-a-button chef Collette.

The miscalculation of Remy's voice comes clear in the scenes where he doesn't speak at all, but must communicate with Linguine strictly through body language. There's poetry in those moments. And there's poetry sprinkled about elsewhere. In two sequences, we actually see what Remy tastes and smells, in a fanciful synesthesia of color and movement. The visual design of Paris and its four star kitchens is without parallel in animation: the sumptuous sheen on a copper pot, the eye-opening wooden texture of a vial of saffron. And who else but Pixar would make sure, in a scene where a kitchen cart is being pushed, that one of the wheels has a little wiggle?

There's a love story here, a villain, a mistaken identity intrigue, a whole extended family of rats to juggle, and to